Twitter has said that it will be cracking down on accounts that repeatedly publish misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
The social media platform said that it will not hesitate to permanently suspend those posting flagrantly misleading information about the pandemic and the various vaccines that have been created to combat it, and that they'll be labelling tweets to better inform users about it.
Similar to the line that they took with former President Donald Trump's baseless claims about electoral fraud following his loss in the 2020 US Presidential Election.
They'll use a combination of automated and human reviewers in order to identify and label the spurious posts about coronavirus vaccines.
Those who choose to post dubious information on several occasions could be in line for a ban of seven days initially, but ones that receive five or more 'strikes' will be taken off the social media platform altogether.
In a media release, they wrote: "As health authorities deepen their understanding of COVID-19 and vaccination programs around the world, we will continue to amplify the most current, up-to-date, and authoritative information."
This latest move follows up on their announcement in December last year that misinformation surrounding vaccines would be removed from the platform.
There is an increasing upward trend in vaccine scepticism around the world, with more than 15 percent of Americans stating that they would 'definitely not' receive one of the three vaccines on offer to them in a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
So far, the USA has administered nearly 77 doses of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines that have been approved, and a third single-dose jab from Johnson & Johnson has been approved on Saturday.
The US Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Dr Anthony Fauci, has said that up to 90 percent of the US population must be vaccinated in order for them to achieve herd immunity.
That means that there is a long way to go, and the number of people who plan to refuse a jab is increasing.
That's presumably why Twitter has decided to step in to remove some of the misleading information that could be swinging people's opinions online.
The most comprehensive study performed in the UK showed that 72 percent of people are willing to be vaccinated, with 16 percent still very unsure and 12 percent strongly hesitant to receive the jabs.
The University of Oxford asked 5,114 people how they'd feel about taking a Covid-19 vaccine from the NHS, and the results were published in the journal Psychological Medicine.
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